The Hampstead Mystery eBook

The boy nodded his head, and turned away. As
he went down the hall again to the front door he gave
an imitation of a man walking with extended arms across
a plank spanning a chasm.

“Picture mad,” commented Crewe, as he
watched him.

“I didn’t quite understand you, sir,”
replied the butler.

“Spends all his spare time in cinemas,”
said Crewe, “and when he is not there he is
acting picture dramas. His ambition in life is
to be a cinema actor.”

Crewe engaged Police-Constable Flack in conversation
while waiting for Mr. Holymead to take his departure.
Flack had so little professional pride that he was
pleased at meeting a gentleman who usurped the functions
of a detective without having had any police training,
and who could beat the best of the Scotland Yard men
like shelling peas, as he confided to his wife that
night. He was especially flattered at the interest
Crewe seemed to display in his long connection with
the police force, and also in his private affairs.
The constable was explaining with parental vanity
the precocious cleverness of his youngest child, a
girl of two, when Holymead made his appearance, and
he became aware that Mr. Crewe’s interest in
children was at an end.

“Look at that man,” said Crewe, in a sharp
imperative tone to the police-constable, as the K.C.
was walking down the path of the Italian garden to
the plantation. “You saw him come in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you see any difference?”

“No, sir; he’s the same man,” said
Flack, with stolid certainty.

“Anything about him that is different?”
continued Crewe.

Police-Constable Flack looked at Crewe in some bewilderment.
He was not a deductive expert, and, as he told his
wife afterwards, he did not know what the detective
was “driving at.” He took another
long look at Holymead, who was then within a few yards
of the plantation on his way to the gates, and remarked,
in a hesitating tone, as though to justify his failure:

“Well, you see, sir, when he was coming in it
was the front view I saw, now I can only see his back.”

But before he had finished speaking Crewe had left
him and was following the K.C. Holymead had gone
into the house without a walking-stick, and had reappeared
carrying one on his arm. Crewe admired the cool
audacity which had prompted Holymead to go into a
house where a murder had been committed to recover
his stick under the very eyes of the police, and he
immediately formed the conclusion that the K.C. had
come to the house to recover the stick for some urgent
reason possibly not unconnected with the crime.
And it was apparent that Holymead was a shrewd judge
of human nature, Crewe reflected, for he calculated
that the rareness of the quality of observation, even
in those who, like Flack, were supposed to keep their
eyes open, would permit him to do so unnoticed.

As Crewe went down the path he beckoned to the boy
Joe, who at the moment was acting the part of a comic
dentist binding a recalcitrant patient to a chair,
using an immense old-fashioned straight-backed chair
which stood in the hall, for his stage setting.
Joe overtook his master as he entered the ornamental
plantation in front of the house, and Crewe quickly
whispered his instructions, as the retreating figure
of the K.C. threaded the wood towards the gates.